Well, hurricane Sandy did no damage to my Chesapeake Bayside QTH. I am thankful for that and I wish a quick recovery to those that were ravaged by this nasty storm. The winds did leave one of my antennas needing attention. The winds pulled my anchor for the center of my ZS6BKW antenna out of the ground and it is now hanging in mid air. This should not be difficult to fix.
I see from last year that we also had high winds just before SS in 2011. Guess I should expect more of that in the future. It is calm now but they are expecting fairly high winds all weekend. I will need to clean up my two existing antennas and I hope to hang the 4 element 20m colinear array on my Penninger Tilt-up mast.
Inside, my station is all ready to go for the contest. I have an SO2R setup using the Icom IC-7600 and an Elecraft K2. This year I will also be using some ICE Bandpass filters to try and reduce the Band-to-Band interference I had in past years. I tested the station, including the DX Doubler, last weekend when I operated a couple hours in the CQWWDX SSB contest. I got about 48 Contacts and added a good number of new Countries in the Log.
I really like the SO2R setup with the DX Doubler and N1MM software. I think I have all the technology pieces in place now. Hopefully I can ramp-up the Sweepstakes operation this year. I will be looking once again for that elusive (for me anyway) Clean Sweep. 83 Sections are needed this year for the Broom.
Kg3v Ham Radio Blog 
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